The Greater Boston Area Theoretical Chemistry Seminar Series, colloquially known as the “TheoChem Seminars”, is a seminar series sponsored jointly by the chemistry departments at Boston University (BU), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Harvard University.
As a seminar series organized by graduate students and post-docs, our philosophy is that the seminar should be a novel learning opportunity. The seminar is divided into two sections: a pedagogical introduction focused on covering background material, followed by a more-typical results-oriented section composed of current interests and active research. Each section is roughly 45 minutes in length, with a short intermission.
The lecture is currently held at MIT, the midpoint of BU and Harvard. While Wednesday afternoon is (typically) reserved for the seminar, we schedule meetings for our speakers with faculty and students of all participating schools (BU-MIT-Harvard) on the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of the same week.
Over the years, our invited speakers have covered a variety of interests ranging from pure science to various aspects of engineering. Theoretical topics covered by speakers include statistical mechanics, chemical physics, quantum chemistry, biological networks, classical simulations, and more.